8/17/2023 0 Comments Bullet the blue sky songfacts![]() A character monologue from Wim Wenders' 1984 film Paris, Texas, was also a significant influence on Bono's writing of the song.Īlthough the lyrics of "Running to Stand Still" were worked on a great deal, the musical composition was essentially improvised by the band during the recording process at Dublin's Windmill Lane Studios. In doing so, the song is not judgmental and shows sympathy for the woman. ![]() The resulting lyric does not describe any of this explicitly, but instead limns the emotional atmosphere that the couple live in. Bono felt the man was decent at heart but was constrained by his squalid living conditions, as well as poor choices, and Bono wanted to illustrate how these poor conditions affected their lives. Out of money and unable to pay the rent due to their habit, the man became a heroin smuggler, operating between Dublin and Amsterdam and taking enormous risks for a big payday. The song's title phrase originated from Bono asking his brother how his struggling business was going, and the brother responding, "It's like running to stand still." Bono had not heard the phrase before, and he thought it expressed what heroin addiction and the effects of the drug on the body were like a writer later described the title as a "perfect distillation of the dynamic of feeding on addiction." Bono had heard a real story about a pair of heroin addicts, a man and a woman, who lived in the Ballymun towers. After they discovered everywhere else in the world that you don't put people living on top of each other, we built them here." Driving by there in 1987, Bono said, "See the seven tall buildings there? They're 'the seven towers.' They have the highest suicide rate in Ireland. ![]() It was through his exposure to people without hope in the flats that Bono began to develop his social consciousness.īono may have used Ballymun as the inspiration (without any explicit lyrical references to it) for the 1980 U2 song "Shadows and Tall Trees", and later likened living in the area to some of the scenes portrayed in the 1992 Mike Newell film Into the West. Guggi later lived in the towers during years that he was struggling personally with drugs. The place began to stink of urine and vomit, and glue sniffers and used needles were common sights, as were appearances of the Garda Síochána. Over time, poor maintenance, lack of facilities for children, transient tenancies, and other factors caused social conditions and communal ties to break down in the flats. ![]() Bono had played in the towers' foundations as they were being built, then traveled in their elevators for the novel experience. Paul Hewson (later known as U2's lead vocalist Bono) had grown up on Cedarwood Road in the adjacent Glasnevin neighborhood, in a house across fields behind the towers, near his friends and future artists Fionán Hanvey (later known as Gavin Friday) and Derek Rowan (later known as Guggi). This lyric was a reference to the Ballymun flats, a group of seven local authority, high-rise residential tower blocks built in the Ballymun neighborhood of Dublin during the 1960s. But "Running to Stand Still" was one of those with specific Dublin connections:" I see seven towers / But I only see one way out ". When they have written about Dublin, allusions to it have often been disguised. U2 has written relatively few songs directly related to their growing up in Dublin, often giving higher priority to works about The Troubles in Northern Ireland or to international concerns. Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott's decline and death from addiction also resonated with Clayton at the time. Bassist Adam Clayton has referred to the song as "Bad Part II". "Running to Stand Still" was written by U2 in the context of the heroin addiction epidemic in Dublin of the 1980s, much like "Bad" (and to some extent "Wire") had been from their 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire. Though a lot of time was dedicated to the lyrics, the music was improvised with co-producer Daniel Lanois during a recording session for the album. A slow ballad based on piano and guitar, it describes a heroin-addicted couple living in Dublin's Ballymun flats the towers have since become associated with the song. "Running to Stand Still" is a song by rock band U2, and it is the fifth track from their 1987 album, The Joshua Tree.
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